Episode 1297: Why Mid-Market Marketing Breaks with Sheila Kloefkorn

Most companies are not failing at marketing because they chose the wrong platform; they are failing because the strategy, message, and target audience are misaligned. In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Sheila Kloefkorn, CEO & President of KEO Marketing Inc., who shares how B2B companies can move beyond scattered marketing and build strategies that connect with the right audience, answer real buyer questions, and support long-term growth. She also discusses the impact of AI on search, SEO, paid ads, reputation management, and YouTube, and explains why educational content is becoming essential to the modern buyer journey. Key Takeaways: → Marketing works best when strategy precedes tactics. → Mid-market companies often lack senior marketing leadership. → A fractional CMO can help bridge the gap between strategy and execution. → The right message starts with understanding the customer’s needs and pain points. → SEO must account for AI chat results and for frequently asked questions. Sheila Kloefkorn is a marketing expert with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations increase revenue through strategic, results-driven marketing. She is the founder and CEO of KEO Marketing, a Phoenix-based B2B marketing agency specializing in marketing strategy, messaging, digital infrastructure, campaign execution, and analytics. Since founding KEO Marketing in 2000, Sheila and her team have developed award-winning campaigns for Fortune 1000 companies and mid-sized businesses across the United States and in more than 100 countries. Her work has helped clients achieve hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue growth. Sheila has received numerous industry honors, including recognition from the Phoenix Business Journal, the Stevie American Business Awards, and MarSum. A certified business coach and frequent speaker, she is also active in the marketing community, serving in leadership roles with the Business Marketing Association, the American Marketing Association, and SEMPO AZ. Connect With Sheila: Website: https://keomarketing.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilakloefkorn/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast, at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be with Sheila Kloefkorn of KEO Marketing, a Phoenix-based

• 1:18Speaker 01

  B2B marketing agency focused on strategy, messaging, digital infrastructure, execution, analytics, and fractional CMO services and growth for mid-market all the way up to Fortune 1,000 companies. Sheila, thanks so much for joining us.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Seth, thanks for having me.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  It is our pleasure. So, let's go back in time a little bit. How did you get started?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  So, I started this agency in 2000, right during the dot-com bubble burst, a very innovative time, just like now. So, we just had our 25th anniversary last September.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Congratulations. Happy anniversary. What did you, what were you doing before? And what did you see in the market that led you to build your own agency?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was running operations for a hundred million dollar agency in New York, living in Phoenix and commuting. So this was my opportunity after that company sold to start my own company and to keep it a little bit smaller and to have a team and a set of clients that we really have done outsized results for, but also have a little bit of a life at the same time.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Understood. I would imagine a across the country commute could be a little challenging. In 2000, that was, you know, before everybody was on Zoom. What did, before we start on your agency, what did that experience teach you about like understanding audiences?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Well, that agency was very focused on youth marketing. So I was in charge of building out the very first HD theater network in the world at college campuses. And that's when an HD projector was the size of a table as opposed to now we have it in our phones. And at that time, you know, the web was just really starting. I used to have conversations about SEO and things like that. And people would say, do you think my customers are really on the internet? It was just a very, a very different time. But whether it was

• 3:27Speaker 02

  for that prior agency or for my own agency, what I know is that business owners are always looking for a way to connect with their audience, their own unique target market. And it's really important to be able to figure out who that is, what they care about, what their pains are, and then match that up with whatever solution that you're providing. And so even today, 25 years later, what happens most often, because we're a business to business marketing agency, and we mostly help. Technology companies, construction companies, industrial companies, things like that, grow their business is that if you go to a website for any of those companies,

• 4:12Speaker 02

  it usually says, "We do these 12 things." And when the visitor comes and looks at that, they go, "Oh, gosh, well, I have these two needs, and I don't really understand the acronyms on the website, but maybe it matches up with those 12 things that the website says." And what we know is that if you expect someone, your customer or prospective customer, to do that many mental gymnastics, they probably leave. So the foundation that I learned in that old agency, and that is still true today, is that if you can't meet your customer where they are, and if you don't really know what their needs are, you're not going to be able to serve them because they are self-focused,

• 4:52Speaker 02

  and you've got to show up where they are, not where you have them show up where you are.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. How did you make the pivot and the switch from youth marketing to business to business?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  A lot of it is very similar. When I was doing youth marketing, we were representing companies who wanted to reach youth. So movie studios, advertisers, those kinds of things. And they were selling into universities. That's no different than selling into a business. So a lot of the mechanics of how that kind of marketing works are the same, even though just in like in lots of our businesses today, it's B to B to B to C. It's very similar.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  What are some of the most common issues that those B to B companies are coming to you to help solve?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Well, we've really built a model around solving sort of the the silent challenge that most mid-market companies have. And that is, as a mid-market company, let's say you're between 10 and 100 million dollars, or maybe 10 to 50 million dollars. Typically, for a company of that size, the issue is just resources. How can they compete with their much larger competitors? And in those cases, most of the time, the CEO is Doing double duty, doing marketing, providing strategy, things like that. So we offer a fractional CMO offering plus a team to augment the marketing team.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Usually it's only a couple of people, actually, at a mid-market company of that size. And we can give them all the advantages of having a big marketing department and a senior level CMO without having the overhead of hiring those folks. And then, in addition to having a better model, they get better execution because they have specialist, access to specialists with, you know, 10, 15, 20 years of experience.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  You talk about marketing activity versus having a real marketing strategy. What's the difference?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So I'll just give you an example. Occasionally I'll get calls from companies and they'll say, I need to be on X. And I'll say, why? Meaning they're very tactically focused and someone on their team or a junior level marketer has said, you know, we need to be on X or we need to be on Meta or something like that. But it's not grounded in a strategy, which is who are you trying to get in front of? Where do they hang out? What's the right message to be in front of those folks? And is Facebook or X even the right channel to be on to deliver that message? So that's the strategy conversation that needs to happen.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  And that typically resonates better with a CEO than having a conversation about why they should just be on X.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  That makes sense. What are some of the most common marketing leadership gaps you see inside mid-market companies?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Well, mid-market companies typically are trying to achieve outsized marketing results with a very junior team and they get mired in that tactical level of stuff. And they're just missing the strategic because if you have the strategic.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Understanding of who you're trying to meet and what the right messaging can be, then all that tactical stuff works. So a lot, probably 90% of the mid-market CEOs I talk to, they've tried marketing and they think marketing doesn't work. And it's not because the marketing itself didn't work, it's because the message or the strategy was off.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  AI is changing how people find and discover companies. What should business-to-business leaders be paying attention to right now?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and it's changing it really fast. So just a few weeks ago, Google rolled out a complete change of their search engine. Everything that Google does now functions as a part of AI. So if you had an SEO strategy, for example, that helped you get found in search, if you haven't adjusted that strategy to answer the frequently asked questions that come in AI chat, you're probably not showing up in those AI chat results. You're not showing up in ChatGPT, you're not showing up in Claude. And so what we've done over the last five years is AIify everything that we do.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It really is built on the same foundations of what worked for SEO for all these years, or what worked for Google Ads for all these years. And it goes back to that strategy. Are you answering the same kinds of questions that your prospects have? And if your website does that, and you have lots of frequently asked questions and it's coded correctly, you're going to show up in search and you're going to show up in AI chat. If you are running ads and you're leveraging, like we just took over a new client and they're still running display ads. Display ads are essentially going away at the end of this month. For two years, Google has been saying that display ads were going away. So if you're not leveraging their Performance Max ad formats,

• 10:17Speaker 02

  which is really an evolution of those display ads, then your ads aren't going to perform as well and you're going to be paying more.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Click cost for Google went up 54% in March.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And so what you have to do is get much better at ads today for your same spend to deliver the same results that you were getting prior to March.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Sounds like a lot more work to stay the same, let alone get ahead.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  You've written about reputation becoming part of the buyer journey before a prospect ever calls or fills out a form. How do you help companies manage that intentionally?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Again, it goes back to that strategy. You've got to have a strategy for what is your message? How do you add value? How do you add value better than everybody else? And then it's got to be everywhere. It's got to be on your website. It's got to be in your Google Business Profile. It's got to be in all of your socials. It's got to be in YouTube. And if you're not leveraging YouTube today, you're missing probably 40% of the opportunity out there. So you've got to have the right strategy, the right message that's going to resonate. And then you've got to build your reputation by delivering helpful educational value. So my master's degree is actually in education and it's so powerful because that's what marketing

• 11:43Speaker 02

  is. We are educating others about how we help them. And the more that we help them buy from us, the more powerful that connection is and the longer you're going to have that client long term. Then you ask yourself, where do people go to get educated? YouTube is the largest outlet on the web, anywhere in the world, for people to get educated. So if you're not in YouTube and if you don't have educational content, not salesy content, but educational content, you're not going to build a reputation as being someone who's going to consistently help them. If you do that, and you can see lots and lots of examples, because you probably go to YouTube on your phone for every little thing that you need

• 12:24Speaker 02

  to figure out how to do, from how to fix your garage door, to what kind of software system should I buy for my company, YouTube is really important. And YouTube is a bigger outlet than all the other streaming and television channels combined.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. You've helped so many businesses over the last, you know, 25, 26 years. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I just think this is the the best thing to be doing. I love this stuff more than anything. Our challenge is the same challenge it's been for 25 years. How do we help companies scale and grow faster and leverage the tools that are out there? So AI has great tools that are changing fast, so we leverage those. All the tools that were just in its infancy 25 years ago have advanced a lot. So whether it's ads, you know, I placed the very first ad on GoTo, which Yahoo bought, which gave Google the idea for Google AdWords.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  It's all the same stuff. And if you're in a position like I am, that you love the change, you love figuring it out, solving problems every week, then this is this is a great thing. And I have a team that loves that, too. And for companies that are just trying to figure it out,

• 13:50Speaker 02

  you know, get educated about it. Make sure that the agency that you're working with is about educating you and staying current and those kinds of things, because that's just the world that we live in today. And for all that adrenaline-filled stuff, it's so powerful to get the results. Like, we have a client that had, you know, a $2 million ad budget last year and came to us and said, "We want you to take over, but we only have a million now. Can you get us the same or better results on half the budget?" And we are really excited that six months in, we've absolutely done that. Like, that's a really fun business challenge to solve.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I love figuring out the problems every day. I love our team. I just get to work with amazing humans, and I really love our clients. You know, all some people say, you know, B2B marketing isn't sexy, but I think it's the most important thing we could do, because all this stuff is the stuff that actually runs the world. You know, people say my stuff's in the cloud. Well, it's actually not. It's in a data center somewhere. And we've done incredible work for a variety of large data centers. People would say, you know, we're in HVAC. HVAC isn't sexy, but you know, if your house doesn't work

• 15:16Speaker 02

  or if your business doesn't work because your HVAC isn't working, then it's a problem. So we just love working with companies that really run the world.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Awesome. Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. For our viewers and listeners who want to learn more, where is the best place for them to go?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  You can absolutely check us out in the socials, K E O Marketing or K E O Marketing dot com. You can also see us in AI chat.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  All right. This has been Seth Green with Sheila Kloefkorn of K E O Marketing. Sheila, thanks again for joining us.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Seth. It was great. And really one love your podcast, love having a chance to be on it. Thank you for helping so many people.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We will talk to you or see you next time.

• 16:04Speaker 03

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